The Bear Season 3 Is As Dark As It Is Hilarious
As somebody who likes his comedy-dramas to be heavy on the comedy and light on the drama, I was worried that The Bear was going to lose its charm when season 3 dropped in its entirety on Hulu last week. After season 2’s “Fishes,” I felt the kind of anxiety in the pit of my stomach that only Carmy Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White) would be familiar with as he winds up for one of his many hyper-manic stress-induced fits of panic. Surprisingly, The Bear is still absolutely unrelenting when it comes to dishing out plate after plate of stress and conflict, but its pacing is what kept me from feeling like a line cook two minutes from closing time when a six-top walks in for an hour of dining.
Still Anxiety-Inducing
Make no mistake, The Bear is a stressful dish to digest with its season 3 run, but I never felt uncomfortable for long enough to really internalize the existential dread. What makes season 3 work so well is how quickly any source of tension is broken by a well-placed line that’s coming from a place of frustration. Just when the pot is about to boil over, it’s not only jokes that take the viewer out of the conflict, but also characters arriving on scene at inappropriate times, wholly unaware of the verbal bedlam that was occurring moments before their entry.
Non-Negotiably Hilarious
A perfect example of this tension-breaking that I feel mirrors sitcoms like Archer or Seinfeld can be found in the second episode, “Next.”
When The Bear’s staff rolls in and learns about Carmy’s psychotic list of “non-negotiables” that he feels are necessary to elevate the eatery to legendary status in season 3, everybody immediately starts screaming at each other. The pent-up aggression between Carmy and Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) that we’ve been waiting to see play out for over a year takes place just the morning after Carmy accidentally locked himself in the walk-in cooler during opening night, and had what I would consider to be an unforgivable exchange with his long-time friend and front-of-house cohort.
With freshly oozing wounds from the night before, Carmy and Richie get into it, but are constantly interrupted by the restaurant staff just trying to get their lives together before the next dinner rush, making me laugh at everybody’s misdirected aggression.
The 37-Minute Cold Open Was A False Alarm
The Bear kicked off season 3 with “Tomorrow,” a 37-minute cold open of sorts with sparse dialogue and tense cinematography, and I first thought my fears of a full-blown shift to dramatic territory were confirmed. As Carmy arrives at the restaurant after the disastrous evening season 2’s finale subjected us to, he begins to work on his list of demands that become clear in the following episode. While he’s meditating on his life, we’re given a prolonged sizzle reel of the traumatic (and wholesome) moments that occurred before the events that took place in season 1.
But worry not, because this dramatic cold-open was simply a primer that plowed through all of the exposition I needed to hit the ground running upon the episode’s somber conclusion.
Donna’s Demons Still Run Deep
The Bear also brings the troubled and unhinged Berzatto family matriarch, Donna (Jamie Lee Curtis), back into the mix in season 3, which is enough to make the most stoic of dramedy viewers sick to their stomach.
While coaching Natalie (Abby Elliot) through delivering her first child, Donna’s overbearing personality is a significant source of humor that I was not ready for as she urges Natalie to take deep breaths while saying “hee hee,” as if Michael Jackson himself was fully dilated and ready to start pushing. There are, of course, heart-wrenching conversations between an estranged mother and daughter, but their willingness to set aside their differences during such a stressful time was as refreshing as the ice chips Donna had the nurse bring to Natalie to help her cool down.
The Perfect Ratio
Doing the unthinkable, The Bear dials the drama to 11 with season 3 without ever losing the dark sense of humor that makes it such an appealing series in the first place. From Cicero’s (Oliver Platt) profanity-laden outbursts when he looks over the restaurant’s financials to Carmy’s unwillingness to give anybody an inch as he tries to be “the guy,” there are plenty of tense moments that will push you to your breaking point right before Neil Fak (Matty Matheson) goes on a rant about being “haunted” by his menacing brother, Sammy (John Cena).
In so many words, I’m so glad that The Bear is still a comedy with its season 3 run, and an excellent one at that.
